Life, love, dreams…

Monthly Archives: January 2013

You can get along with anybody as long as you able to put yourself in his shoes and walk in them for a while.

Everybody has a reason to act, talk, and express emotions in a certain way because there is something behind, something that created a pattern in human behavior. Each person carries the burden of his past, carefully registered in special parts of the brain and unfortunately in so many cases the past invades the present making the people to judge their current situations applying the conclusions long outdated.

It is really painful to see people who find themselves trapped in past, stumbling over the same mistakes again and again, without trying to learn a lesson and move forward. So often the former sorrows and unhappiness affect the present state of being that people blindly and unconsciously cease to leave in the moment and to approach everything comes in their life as a totally new experience. As a result the people attract more bitter situations, they are prone to fight against anything because the whole outside world seems to be for them a big enemy.

These people are not to be blamed because the past can really be a course and it requires a lot of courage and inner power to overcome the fears, resentments, doubts which poisoned the soul and the mind during the years.

Each person has its own struggles; nobody is perfect that’s why all we need is little empathy. Just to stop and try to understand the other person’s actions and then ask ourselves how would we react in a similar situation having the same background as his? Suddenly things become more clear and the accusations irrelevant…

Showing understanding is so simple and human; usually all we need is just a person who would listen and empathize.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

This famous quote from the essay called “A room of one’s own” by V. Woolf emphases the main idea the author is approaching in her work.

In this essay, Woolf attempts to analyze the women’s status in literature during the history…or rather the lack of their presence, particularly, as writers (with few exceptions) until 19th century. The author goes deep in her research and explain the condition of a woman in a society mainly dominated by men. Woolf points out that in a situation when the female was seen just as wife and mother, inferior to the other sex ; when she didn’t have any education, privacy, right to own property or vote; when she was calling witch or morally depraved for wanting to study, write or act – it was just impossible for her to become a poet or a novelist…being the subject of people’s mockery, she simply would not survive. ” Most women have no character at all”;” Cats do not go to heaven though they have souls of a sort and women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare, even they write something” – that’s the cruel reality for a very long period of time.

” Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men.”

The result of this situation was that the history, the literature, the painting and music, the politics and discoveries were entirely dominated by men. Women appear as muses, as characters seen through the eyes of men…they seem to live somehow in a shadow, without opinion, dreams or right to express themselves.

Woolf concludes that a woman needs to be financial independent and to have privacy in order to be able to write, otherwise it’s almost impossible to do that:

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but for the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom then sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and room of one’s own.”

At the end of her essay, Woolf describes the opportunities of her time, when women got much more possibilities, rights and independence to be creative, to pour their souls on the paper writing fiction or poetry…but, unfortunately just few of them took that chance and when they did that they usually tried to write in a man’s style. Woolf comments this fact by saying:

“I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make is sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.”

One more idea that derives from the essay and should be mentioned is that V. Woolf, doesn’t agree with the male’s domination in literature but she also deprecates the women writers whose works lay on blames toward the other sex.

“It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or a man-womanly. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fulness. There must be freedom and there must be peace.”

A wonderful essay about women, fiction and men between them. It definitely represents a masterpiece meant to rise awareness about woman’s position in society, namely in literature laying an initial theoretical basement for the future current of feminism.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dream, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…In proportion as he simplifies life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them…Henry David Thoreau